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Hoop Is Thicker Than Water

AT MCNICHOLS ARENA IN DENVER, IT'S the second quarter of a sloppy game between two losing teams, the Denver Nuggets and the Golden State Warriors. Rick Barry, the 51-year-old basketball Hall of Famer, is watching more intensely than most of the players are playing. "Come on!" he says.

Jon Barry, one of his four basketball-playing sons, is a 6-foot-4 guard for the Warriors who averages about 11 minutes a game. So far tonight, his time is gliding by uneventfully. Tim Hardaway passes inside to Joe Smith without even glancing in Jon's direction. "Jon's not exactly a primary option in this offense," his father grumbles.

Two teen-agers approach Rick for autographs. He signs without taking his eyes from the game. Suddenly, Jon slaps the ball away from his opponent and races downcourt. "Watch this pass!" Rick shouts. Sure enough, Jon finds his teammate Chris Mullin filling the lane and flips him a smart pass for a layup. Rick is on his feet. "See? I told you he was going to see him!"

No matter how many great passes he makes or points he scores, Jon will never equal what his father did on the basketball court. Neither, in all likelihood, will any of his brothers. Rick Barry averaged 23 points a game during his N.B.A. career, led both the N.B.A. and the old A.B.A. in scoring (he shuttled among six teams from 1965 to 1980) and carried this same Warriors franchise to a championship. He was a brilliant passer and made 90 percent of his free throws, for years an N.B.A. record, using his own singular style: bending the knees and shooting the ball underhand. If you're of a certain age, it is impossible to see anyone shoot like that and not immediately think of Rick Barry.

Above all, he was renowned for a competitiveness that verged on fury. He raged at referees and berated teammates. Ill-chosen shots by lesser players offended his sense of the order of the universe -- didn't they understand how the game worked? He carried himself with supreme arrogance, on and off the court.

Larry Brown, the coach of the Indiana Pacers and Barry's old roommate, says that Rick would do anything for a friend; still, Brown refers to him as "a jerk." Billy Paultz, who played with Barry on the New York Nets, once said: "Half of the players disliked Rick Barry. The other half hated him." He didn't fare much better with the fans, referees or basketball executives.

Now that all of Barry's adult sons have followed him into basketball, they are braving comparisons to both his talent and his temperament. Brent, a rookie with the Los Angeles Clippers, has joined Jon in the N.B.A.; Drew is a senior at Georgia Tech and Scooter, who played on the 1988 championship team for Larry Brown at the University of Kansas, now plays in Germany. (Barry also has a 2-year-old son, Canyon Shane, from his current marriage.)

They have succeeded not because they are Rick Barry's sons but, in some measure, despite it. Jon wonders aloud if referees dislike him. Brent is determined to play a more flamboyant style of basketball than his father did, and a few weeks ago, he broke out in a big way, winning the N.B.A. slam-dunk contest at the All-Star Game.

Lately, Rick has become his sons' most visible supporter. When he's not roaming the country to see them play, he's home in Colorado Springs, scanning for satellite telecasts of their games. He has not always been so attentive. Rick saw little of his sons after a contentious divorce from their mother, Pam Connolly, who suffered a nervous breakdown from the ordeal. She, not their father, became the cheerleader as they followed him into basketball. "It was hard watching them at times," she recalls. "Going to basketball games was a very emotional attachment to something I wanted to detach from."

Rick, meanwhile, was building a career as a television broadcaster and trying to find work as a coach and an actor. "I didn't see my children as often as I would have liked to," he says. "Let's leave it at that. But I made a much better effort than they're aware of."

His ex-wife, not surprisingly, disagrees. "He read that book 'Looking Out for Number One,' and he did" she says. "He just got wrapped up in himself."

These days, Rick has more time on his hands. Though he'd like to be a broadcaster or an N.B.A. coach, the offers aren't coming. "I've had tons of people tell me how much they like me as a broadcaster," he says. "I say: 'I wish you were in position to give me a job. Unfortunately, you're not, so it doesn't do me much good.' " He's working part time for a corporate logistics firm and taking care of his young son by his third wife, Lynn, an executive with U.S.A. Basketball, the sport's national governing body. Everybody in the Barry family, it turns out, is involved in basketball except for him.

Tonight in Denver, Rick walks down to the court at halftime to see Jon. They don't shake hands; they exchange greetings and look uncomfortable. Then Rick heads back to his seat.

With five minutes left in the game, he stands to leave. He has to get up early and besides, he explains, Jon and the Warriors are flying out right after the game. Rick walks up the aisle, a ramrod-straight 6 feet 7 inches, his head high above the crowd. If there are any well-wishers, he doesn't see them. SOMETIMES I JUST DON'T FEEL LIKE talking basketball," says Jon one afternoon after a Warriors practice at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. He's talking about his father. "He'll call me up -- 'Saw the game last night. Why'd you get pulled out? You were going good.' I don't need to hear that. It's over and done. Let it go."

Jon spent three years with the Milwaukee Bucks that ended with an expired contract and an uncertain future. But he caught on with the Warriors and has played unexpectedly well. He came to Oakland with a reputation as difficult, the Barry who acted most like his father -- although, with dark hair and an aquiline nose, he's the one with the least physical resemblance. He does have the same competitive drive, and some of the arrogance. "He probably isn't aware of it, and might not want to admit it," says Rick. "The comparison drives him crazy."

After his parents divorced in 1979, Jon decided he wanted to live with his father. He spent 9th and 10th grades in Seattle, where Rick was living with his second wife. Rick traveled a lot for his broadcasting job, and his wife accompanied him. "I'd be left at home with the housekeeper for a week at a time," Jon says. "By the end, I felt like I'd been abandoned twice. He left once, and then I went up there and got abandoned all over again."

Jon returned home to Danville, Calif. "When Jon came back, we didn't know who he was," Brent says. "He was so introverted and reclusive and uninviting, we couldn't find a way in. Jon would fight with my mother or Scooter and we'd say, 'Who are you?' "

The household was ruthlessly competitive -- in basketball, tennis, backgammon, even over who could eat cereal fastest. Any game usually ended in a fight, with one brother quitting and running upstairs. "It was brutal," Jon says. "Every day, fend for yourself, come out on top."

Jon carried this aggression with him when he went to play basketball at Georgia Tech; he argued furiously with referees, an involuntary echo of his father. Before a game in New Orleans, Jon told his coach he couldn't play because his mother and father would both be there. "They can't be in the same room without something happening," Jon explains.

When Rick shows up at courtside these days, or in the hallway outside a locker room, Jon is uncertain how to react. "The years he missed are the key years," he says. "When you're not there, it's hard to climb back in." Yet if his father stopped coming, Jon admits, he'd probably resent him more. "I couldn't tell you where we're at now," he says, his eyes unfocused. "It's not that I don't like him, or don't love him. I just don't know where we are."

FOR A WHILE, BRENT BARRY WORE NO. 24 -- Rick's number. "He was the only one of us who ever said, 'I'm Rick Barry's son,' " says Scooter. "We were at camp playing Ping-Pong, and Brent stepped up even though other kids were waiting. 'I'm Rick Barry's son,' he said, and I almost slapped him."

Brent, the third of the four sons, was also the only one who shot his free throws underhand. "When my father left, I was 9 years old," he says over a sandwich in a featureless stretch of Los Angeles near the Clippers' practice gym. "I didn't understand what divorce was, I just knew my dad wasn't going to be around. Subconsciously, maybe all that was a way to try and keep him there."

Despite Brent's size -- he's now a gangly 6 feet 6 inches -- and obvious basketball talent, his selfish play kept him on the bench in high school. "He wanted to be a star, and he didn't realize you had to buckle down, do the work," says his stepfather, Bill Connolly. Brent's brother Drew, a year younger, became a varsity starter as a sophomore, and the two rarely spoke.

By then, Brent had alienated most of the family. When Jon had to give Brent a ride to school, he was so embarrassed that he made him ride in the trunk. "He was one of the worst kids I've ever been around," Jon says. "He was cynical, he snarled at people. My mother gave him a stereo for Christmas and he was like, 'This isn't the one I wanted.' "

During his sophomore year at Oregon State, Brent brought friends home to Danville. They sat around the house, eating Pam's cooking and making a mess. When he wouldn't help clean, Connolly told him he was no longer welcome.

"I knew he was right," Brent says now, "because I didn't like myself. I woke up one day, and that's the person I'd become because I couldn't get over my parents' separation. I wanted those ties to still bind, but they didn't. And I was the last of my brothers to realize it."

He spent the summer in Oregon, working in a pharmacy, lifting weights and getting his head straight. He made a practice of sitting down to lunch every day with a stranger. He asked questions, learned to be friendly. He started playing basketball with new confidence, and began showing the flamboyance that has since become his signature.

The 15th player chosen in last June's N.B.A. draft, Brent, 24, made the N.B.A.'s all-rookie game during the All-Star Weekend. His surprising victory in the dunking competition immediately disinvited comparisons with his father. Brent's brothers agree that he is the Barry with the brightest basketball potential, the only one with a chance to approach their father's greatness. All that, Brent says, he owes to Connolly, who stepped in with the right blend of discipline and support. "If I hadn't changed as a person," says Brent, "my work ethic and my game wouldn't have changed."

He isn't as grateful toward his father, as he told the psychologist for one N.B.A. team during his pre-draft interviews. "He let it be known that, though he was Rick Barry's son, he had nothing to do with him," says the coach of that team.

As with the other boys, Rick now tries to connect with Brent through basketball. "He'll call up and say, 'I got a play that maybe you should run by Coach,' " says Brent. "That's the stuff you don't want to hear. It's almost as if he has no human side. As much as he can teach me about the game of basketball, and talk about what I should be doing to become an N.B.A. star, I could talk for just as long to him about dealing with people. Just how to be nice, to communicate, to smile when you're ordering food from a waitress and ask if she's having a good day. It's funny, how the master can teach the dog, and yet the dog can also teach the master." DREW BARRY, GEORGIA TECH'S POINT guard, dribbles along the perimeter, scanning the floor. He's 6 feet 5 inches but, because he's stockier than Brent or Jon, seems smaller. When he spots an opening in the Louisville defense, he buzzes a pass to Eddie Elisma, the center, alone under the basket. Elisma fumbles the ball out of bounds. The N.B.A. scouts in the stands wait for Drew to yell at Elisma, or at least glare. That's what Rick would have done.

Not Drew. "I know Eddie doesn't play with a lot of confidence," Drew says later. "If I yell at him, he'll go into a shell. Instead, I pat him on the butt and say, 'Next time we'll get the dunk.' "

Drew worries about how he's playing, how his thinning hair looks on television and not much else. "I hardly ever get stressed," he says. "Everyone says I don't bear the scars of a lot that went on, and I don't. I take serious things a lot simpler because they're easier to deal with that way."

As the youngest brother, Drew was the tag-along, often playing with better, older athletes. He learned to defer, passing instead of shooting, not looking to create his own opportunities. His brothers fear that such unselfishness might keep Drew from the N.B.A. It happened to Scooter, who was so conditioned to distribute the ball that he sometimes couldn't bring himself to take a wide-open shot. "He's the best shooter of all of them," Rick says of Scooter, "but he didn't have the 'rep' as a shooter coming out of college. And 'rep' is everything."

The top reserve on Kansas's 1988 championship team, Scooter was the first of Rick's sons to surface in the national consciousness. Rick had come to only one of Scooter's high-school games -- because, he says, he didn't want to embarrass or intimidate him. But he did introduce Scooter to Pete Maravich, the best ball handler of his generation. Scooter's game began to blossom after the Maravich connection. Now, as he was becoming a prominent player with a winning Kansas team, Rick wanted to be there. "All of a sudden, Rick Barry shows up and takes the attention from Scooter," says Larry Brown. "He didn't think about coming until then."

In 1989, Scooter was the last player cut by the Boston Celtics, and never made the N.B.A. "It would be very easy for him to be jealous," Rick says. "Two brothers are in the N.B.A., a third has a chance, and he just missed it." Still, Scooter roots for his brothers. Now 29, he lives near Dusseldorf, Germany, playing once a week in a league that includes students, scientists and doctors.

But even Scooter's cautionary tale won't push Drew to play more selfishly or holler at a slacking teammate. "He's seen what it's done to my dad's career, as far as people disliking him, and he wants to make sure he's not even close," Jon says. "He's very worried about what other people think. I see him out there laughing with opposing players, joking around during the game, and I can't believe it."

IN JANUARY, WHEN HE CAME TO WATCH Drew play against North Carolina, Rick turned up on national television, holding his 2-year-old son. A week earlier, he was in Los Angeles for Brent's game against Indiana. "Wherever he goes, the attention is going to be drawn to him," says Larry Brown. "He's got to back off a little bit, say, 'Hey, this is their chance.' "

Rick might give his sons more space if he still had his own connection to the game. His broadcasting career ended abruptly in 1992 after a contract dispute with Turner Sports. A few months earlier, he had played in the N.B.A. Legends Game -- a traditionally low-key old-timers game -- and griped about the refereeing; some broadcasting sources say that, while his relationship with Turner had already soured, this embarrassment sealed his fate. Whatever the reason, and despite his legitimate skills as a broadcaster, no one else has been willing to hire him.

So he took a coaching job in something called the Global Basketball Association. He did it just to see if he'd like it, and because so many people had told him he wouldn't. "I don't like people telling me that I can or can't do something," he says. Barry coached Cedar Rapids to a 12-4 record, then broke down in tears when the league announced it was folding. In January 1993, he was hired to coach the Fort Wayne Fury of the Continental Basketball Association, a step below the N.B.A.

"I took a team that had no pride, that was an embarrassment, and made it respectable," Rick says. But in a conflict over personnel, he went against his basketball instincts. "In an effort to avoid the reputation I had as difficult to get along with, I agreed to what the owners wanted," he says. "It was the worst thing we could have done." He was fired the next season with a 14-30 record, having lost 12 games in a row.

One of the players he brought to Fort Wayne was Scooter. Spending time together on the court, on buses and in hotel rooms, Scooter grew to understand his father, if not embrace him. "When he was a player and he walked in a room, people dropped to their knees," Scooter says. "Women put their keys in his lap. He became the kind of person who expected that, because he was Rick Barry. Now, he's beginning to see that the way you treat people comes back to you. We still cringe every time he orders a meal. We say, 'Please, Dad, just this once, don't send the food back.' But he's trying, he's getting better."

Today, Rick says, he'd take a job as an assistant coach if it meant returning to the N.B.A. Last summer, the New Jersey Nets hired Butch Beard, a former teammate; Rick says that Beard approached him about a coaching job, but that the Nets' management vetoed him. Although Barry would seem to be a likely member of the old-boy sports network, he understands the problem. "I know a lot of people around the league," he says, "but that's not the same as being friends with them."

For now, Rick coaches the only team he has: his sons. "I try not to give them advice," he says, "but it's so hard not to say something, because I want to make them better players." In the next breath, he acknowledges that he doesn't have their ear, anyway: "Do you think I never told Scooter the things he had these great revelations about after I put him in touch with Pete Maravich?"

As the novelty of his sons' careers fades, Rick's shadow will fade also. Right now, though, it seems inescapable. Last November, Rick showed up in Oakland to watch Brent's Clippers play Jon's Warriors, and so did Pam, the boys' mother. Rick, without the N.B.A. connections he once had, sat in a corner section; his retired jersey, hanging behind one basket, had a better view. Pam, meanwhile, was watching from center court. "It was eerie," Pam says. "I was sitting there, in almost the same seats we used to have, saying hello to the same vendors, watching Jon and Brent on the same floor where I used to see Rick. I was having flashbacks, remembering when Rick scored 50 points for the first time and threw me the ball. I was seeing Rick playing out there."

Somewhere behind that penetrating stare, Rick probably was, too. The last simple time he had was with the ball in his hands, the certainty that he could score, the women waiting for him, the unlimited possibilities. He seems to finally understand that life can't be that simple anymore. And that the unlimited possibilities, for now, belong to his sons.